“When I was 18, I remember I got very serious in my relationship with the Lord, and I really believed it with all my heart, I believed God was calling me to play music,” Cooper said—a calling that he recalled wasn’t easy to accept.
“It was hard because on my mom’s deathbed—my mom had gotten very into [the] Word of Faith [movement] before she died,” Cooper shared. Growing up Southern Baptist, the “Hero” singer said his mother was “looking for that miracle [and] went kind of Kenneth Copeland-ish.”
“So for the last three weeks that my mom was alive, I didn’t get to say bye to her, because she didn’t want us to lose faith,” Cooper continued. “She was going to be healed. She was in the hospital [and] didn’t want us to lose faith seeing her like that. And if we came to say bye, that would be an admission of not having faith.”
Cooper credits his mother as the reason he is “walking with the Lord” and made clear what he was sharing was “not disparaging” towards her. “It’s just a sad piece of this story,” he explained.
John Cooper’s Mother Had a Vision About Him on Her Deathbed
“I knew in my heart I was supposed to be playing music,” Cooper added. “But I had been told by people that love me dearly that on my mom’s deathbed—she’s pumped full of all sorts of morphine or whatever it is that they give to you when you’re in that sort of agony at the end—she was having visions and dreams.”
“And part of those visions were that one of her sons, me, was going to lead people to hell through Christian music,” Cooper said, clarifying that “I was going to play Christian music and the devil was going to use me to lead people to hell.”
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Because he believes that his calling to music was made clear by God, Cooper said that he put his mother’s vision to bed. “I know God has called me to this, and I don’t believe [the vision] was real,” he said. “I just think they were really godly people that were wrong about something.”
Skillet hopes to release new music in 2026 and will be heading out on a short U.S. spring tour before embarking on a European tour and summer festival dates.
